Behind the Gauge
Fill Pipe explains heating a home with heating oil or propane in Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont and upstate New York, and how to add a heat pump without losing backup heat.
Updated
What Fill Pipe is
Fill Pipe is a set of plain pages for households that heat with oil or propane up north: what the fuel costs and how it is sold, what the tank and gauge are telling you, what to do when something smells, stops or runs dry, and how a cold-climate heat pump fits beside the old boiler. Start at the front page or go straight to oil, propane, tanks, switching or safety.
Pages lead with the answer, name the state when rules differ, and put a date on every price.
What Fill Pipe is not
Fill Pipe is not a fuel dealer, propane company, oil service company or heating contractor. It delivers no fuel, fills no tanks, installs or repairs nothing, inspects nothing and gives no quotes. When a page says a job belongs to someone else, it means your fuel dealer, your propane supplier, a licensed technician or a licensed electrician, and the ground rules explain why.
Fill Pipe has no connection to any business that used this web address before. The people who run it also own some stores and work with a heating company; the owners and outbound links page says who and where those links appear.
Where the facts come from
Prices, rules and safety steps come from primary sources: state energy offices and environmental agencies in Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont and New York; federal agencies such as EIA, the IRS, CPSC and CDC; the propane industry's safety council (PERC) and the National Oilheat Research Alliance; NEEP, ENERGY STAR and the state efficiency programs; and equipment makers' own manuals. Each page links the documents it relies on and ends with a short note on what it was built from and what it left out.
No page reports tests, stories or reviews of our own, and example households are labeled as examples.
When pages change
Pages are re-checked when an agency, efficiency program or maker changes its guidance, and price figures always carry the survey name and date they came from. Fuel prices move weekly in the heating season and rebate amounts change without much notice, so treat any figure here as a dated snapshot and check the linked source before you act. Fill Pipe has no contact form, inbox or comment section.